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Using cURL to Determine If the Specified URL Is a Valid Page

April 30, 2019 / Tom

Earlier this month, I wrote about finding the destination of a redirect using cURL in PHP. This can be a useful function to use whenever:

you know the URLs with which you’re dealing are going to redirect,
you know that the number of redirects will be limited to one.

Granted, in the latter case, it’s becoming more difficult because sites like, say, Twitter, have multiple redirects before you get to the destination.

But that’s a topic for another post (unless you just want to implement a recursive or iterative way of working through requests until you find the final destination).

Anyway, there’s another thing that can also be useful whenever you’re working with redirects and with cURL, and that’s determining if the specified URL takes you to a valid page.

I’m Reducing Blog Content: The Newsletter

April 29, 2019 / Tom

Over the next few months, I’m planning to make a few changes to this blog and the tertiary content around it. This includes the newsletter, the podcast, membership content, and more.

And by changes, I don’t mean getting rid of everything. Somethings, maybe, but certainly not all.

Between life and work, I’m busier than I’ve ever been – a good thing, to be clear – but I’m looking to simplify things where I can. And the newsletter seemed like one of the clearest places to start.

The blog, as it stands, will continue to be about WordPress development and I’ll continue to share content regularly; however, this month’s newsletter will be the last one that I’ll be sending on the regular.

Using Functions in Place of Globals: get_post_field

April 24, 2019 / Tom

As PHP has continued to move forward and WordPress (and its developer-economy) works to begin using more of the more modern features, one of the things we still see happening is the use of globals within WordPress.

To some degree, it’s inevitable: Significant parts of the application were built using globals when that was the facility that was a primary feature; other parts, though, have moved forward by providing classes or functions that prevent us from needing to do that.

Case in point: get_post_field is a solid alternative to using the $post global that provides much of the same information in a slightly more modern (and arguably safer) way of reading the data.

How to Manipulate the DOM Using PHP

April 23, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to manipulating the DOM, the first thing many of us likely think of is using JavaScript to do whatever it is we need to do.

Not only does the language natively support functions for doing this, newer features of ES6 give us more powerful ways to build client-side scripts. And if you’re using jQuery with WordPress, then you have the same library of functions for, ahem, querying the DOM that we’ve had for years.

But manipulating the DOM on the client-side isn’t always the best option. Instead, you may want to do so on the server-side. And because of some of the features built into PHP, it’s not much different from how we do things using JavaScript.

Manipulate the DOM Using PHP: Manipulate the DOM Using PHP: DOmDocument

Other than, of course, we’re doing so on the server.

Privacy is Hard: Email

April 18, 2019 / Tom

A few weeks ago, I started writing about a couple of things related to privacy on the web (which is a topic that I think many of us think about in some capacity).

You can catch up on everything I’ve written about thus far, but this post is going to follow-up with something I mentioned in the previous post.

Specifically, I mentioned a simple alternative for not giving out your email address.

Although Burner Mail works well, I also think it’s worth using third-party services for your standard email, too. After all, it’s worth having your privacy protected there, too, right?

BurnerMail (and services like Throttle) are great for providing temporary email addresses with which you can still access those messages for some time.

Email Privacy: BurnerMail

But what if you’re looking for an actual email service that respects privacy and, say, doesn’t parse the information in your inbox to generate advertisements (or other similar functionality)?

Tom McFarlin

Using cURL to Determine If the Specified URL Is a Valid Page

I’m Reducing Blog Content: The Newsletter

Using Functions in Place of Globals: get_post_field

How to Manipulate the DOM Using PHP

Privacy is Hard: Email